My experience is the same. For day to day, bluetooth phone<->car connection beats Carplay or Android Auto. Wireless autoconnect is key, should've been in the V1 of those standards.

I never bother with Carplay for less than a 1 hour trip.

CarPlay connects wirelessly through both Bluetooth and WiFi. I’m enjoying it a lot. Never need to pull my phone out my pocket.

That’s awesome. I didn’t know wireless was supported. Clearly some car manufacturers have done better jobs with the integration/hardware than others.

It needs WiFi for a wireless connection, Bluetooth doesn’t have enough bandwidth.

We use CarPlay all the time, it works almost instantaneously after plugging the phone and it is always responsive. The primary beef that we have with it is that you cannot use Google Maps. Though Apple Maps is definitely many times better than the built-in navigation system.

As you say, it is probably a problem with some hardware.

It seems based on other comments that it varies wildly by manufacturer. Several others in here mentioned issues with the same vehicle I have. Really unfortunate, it’s clearly better than the built in software. Maybe there is hope that Volvo will issue an update that improves stability.

Eh, it’s instant on in my car (a Citroen) but I suspect they start booting the electronics when I unlock the car. In the 3 months I have had the car it have never crashed but twice CarPlay refused to find the phone and required a reboot of the phone.

Aside from the startup time, I don’t have any of those problems. I love CarPlay and would not consider buying a car without it

You need a better, stronger lightning cable for your car. Apple OEM cables can’t take the wear and tear in a car. As long as my lightning cable is good, so is CarPlay. You can also go the wireless route as an alternative

Interesting. I am using Apple branded cables. Any specific recommendations on what works well?